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PayPalInterplay Entertainment announced today they're updating many of their classic titles to support Linux. A lot of it of course is thanks to the excellent free and open source DOSBox, which allows thousands of classic to play on modern systems without much hassle.
First of the announcements was that Battle Chess 4000 is now available on Steam, and it comes straight out of the gate with builds setup for Linux too. On their Twitter, Interplay mentioned:
As part of the drive to bring our classic pool of games to an entirely new generation of gamers, we will also update our back catalogue today, providing Tux & Apple support for heavyweight titles such as Earthworm Jim, Stonekeep and Descent!
Tux and Apple being Linux and macOS if that wasn't clear.
Going over their list of games on Steam there's quite a few. Here's some that added Linux builds recently:
- Battle Chess
- Battle Chess II: Chinese Chess
- Castles
- Cyberia
- Descent
- Descent 2
- Dragon Wars
- Ignition
- Lost Eden
- M.A.X.: Mechanized Assault & Exploration
- Prehistorik
- Prehistorik 2
- Redneck Deer Huntin'
- Redneck Rampage Rides Again
- Shattered Steel
- …and so on, with more to come
Worth noting that Descent 3 already had Linux support, as porter Ryan Gordon did some work back in 2020 to re-port the game along with many tech upgrades for modern Linux gaming.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Craggles086 Oct 17, 2021
You can already play those games easily on Linux with DOSBox. I don't know why they are selling those games on Steam or GOG when most of those those games can be downloaded for free, legally, at archive.org.
Battle Chess was released by Interplay for the Commodore 64 in the mid 80’s
So yes, a bit of history there. But better full screen support with upscaled graphics
for modern displays would make the Descent series worthwhile for me.
Looking forward to playing Descent 2 on the Steam Deck.
So does this mean native Linux support, or through Proton?
slaapliedje Oct 17, 2021
Descent is already native.You can already play those games easily on Linux with DOSBox. I don't know why they are selling those games on Steam or GOG when most of those those games can be downloaded for free, legally, at archive.org.
Battle Chess was released by Interplay for the Commodore 64 in the mid 80’s
So yes, a bit of history there. But better full screen support with upscaled graphics
for modern displays would make the Descent series worthwhile for me.
Looking forward to playing Descent 2 on the Steam Deck.
So does this mean native Linux support, or through Proton?
TheRiddick Oct 17, 2021
would be cool, maybe.
M.A.X.: Mechanized Assault & Exploration
Just by the off chance that anyone is still into this and wants to multiplayer: Mechanized Assault & eXploration Reloaded is still out there.
The release is basically fine but very old.
The GIT develop branch has a lot of changes under the hood (mostly moving to SDL2) but we didn't reach release quality [yet]. It also uses CMAKE nowadays so it should be way easier to compile too.
Disclaimer: Yes, that's kinda my baby.
slaapliedje Oct 18, 2021
slaapliedje Oct 19, 2021
Those games were already available for Linux on GoG.Yup, and some were already available on Steam for Linux, weren't they? Is this Interplay or Valve? Doesn't seem like it would be hard for Valve to just add DOSbox native to the games that alreafy wrap it in.
I have Descent3 from when it was originally ported back in the lokigames days. My favorites from their efforts were the Rune games.
I have that too, along with a few other Loki titles.
slaapliedje Oct 22, 2021
I have Descent3 from when it was originally ported back in the lokigames days. My favorites from their efforts were the Rune games.Rune was awesome. Wasn't there going to be another one at some point?
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